


The only way forward is up

by Madz616



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Basically Jim's life, Character Study, Gen, Jim-centric, One Shot, Star Trek: AOS, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Up to Star Trek: Into Darkness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 17:25:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12370470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Madz616/pseuds/Madz616
Summary: The first time Jim realises that he hates George Kirk he is only four years old.





	The only way forward is up

**Author's Note:**

> This is my attempt at a Jim-Centric character study, looking at the impact George Kirk had on Jim's life up until near the end of Into Darkness. Fairly canon compliant, but there is some creative licence in there too. Two tiny swears.  
> One shot for now - may add Beyond in the future, depending on where this takes me.

The first time Jim realises that he hates George Kirk he is only four years old.  
Winona Kirk is leaving again, this time for much longer. She’s running away to the Black, leaving Jim and Sam behind with Frank. Frank, who hates both boys and can barely control himself when Winona is actually there.  
Jim knows it’s his fault their mother is leaving.  
He’s seen pictures of his father, blonde hair and icy blue eyes that are identical to Jim’s and are the reason that Winona can barely look at him, let alone hug him and say she loves him.  
Sam is angry with him too, and Jim knows that his older brother blames him for the way Winona is around them now.  
So, their mother leaves and Frank backhands Jim so hard his head spins.  
All because he looks like George Kirk.  
The first time Jim hates his father he is only four, but it is certainly not the last time.  
Not by a long shot.

 

Sam finally gives up.  
Jim catches his brother packing and knows he’ll probably never see the other boy again, at least if Sam has anything to say about it.  
Jim sometimes wonders if Sam hates George Kirk as well, wonders if that is why the older boy refuses to answer to anything other than his middle name, ignoring anyone who calls him George Kirk Jr.  
Jim never does find out.  
Sam runs away that afternoon, leaving Jim in a house with Frank who has been drinking for days and would sooner choke Jim into silence than actually _look after_ him.  
Jim hasn’t heard from Winona in months, Sam is gone and Frank hates him.  
So, Jim steals his Father’s Corvette.  
Sam had told him that no matter what Frank said, the car had belonged to George Kirk. The man liked to claim the antique as his, even as the convertible simply sat there collecting dust.  
Driving the car is easy. Jim has always been clever, smart beyond his peers. The simple push clutch doesn’t take him long and the gears only grind once. But that’s fine because he’s on a straight road and his nerve to go any faster leaves him before he actually hits top gear.  
It doesn’t matter though. The sun is bright, and when he releases the roof so that it flies off behind him, the wind is loud and whips his hair around his face.  
Frank calls, telling him to return the car, telling him that the car was _Frank’s_.  
Jim ignores him, turns the music up loud and yells, feeling more alive than he could ever remember.  
He drives past Sam.  
A police officer catches up to him.  
Jim _turns_ , bringing the car onto dirt and feeling the traction of the authentic rubber tires lessen. His heart hammers in his chest, wild and _free_ and Jim never wants it to end.  
He sees the edge of the ravine coming and for the briefest moment thinks, _what if I just kept going?_  
But he’s young and _he knows he is_. He’ll get out of Iowa someday.  
He turns the car, leaping clear just as the antique slides over the edge and into oblivion.  
The Officer is there and Jim can’t help but be cocky.  
When he answers with his name, he’s loud and sure. Maybe, if he proves he’s just a good for nothing trouble maker, people will stop comparing him to George.  
Jim unknowingly secures his destiny.  
“My name is James Tiberius Kirk.”

 

Jim gets sent away, becomes JT, and at the start it’s the best thing that has ever happened to him.  
Tarsus IV is brilliant. His aunt and uncle treat him as if he were their own. He does well in school. He makes friends.  
He should have known that it was too good to last.  
JT, still quick minded and brilliant, quickly notices that the food is being more and more carefully rationed. Notices that everyone walks around with their heads down.  
Notices that something is very, very wrong.  
JT hacks the personal files of Kodos and finds _The List_.  
His name isn’t there which means that he’s wanted, means that he’s safe. But there are so many that aren’t.  
He found the list too late to save his aunt and uncle, running home to find them already dead.  
He doesn’t give up. He goes from house to house. He finds thirteen kids.  
He steals the left over rations and water from the houses that are already starting to stink like death and decay and takes his kids away from the town, giving up his chance to take the easy road.  
They find a cave and Jim does his best to keep them all safe.

 

Two of his kids die in the first two weeks.  
There is no easy food that is safe to eat that hasn’t been stolen from town. It’s hot during the day and deathly cold at night and they can’t risk a fire.  
Three weeks after the day of death, JT first kills someone.  
He’d been on a food run, closer to the main town dwellings than he would have preferred but his options were getting limited.  
A guard sees him. There’s a brief scuffle and JT, who fought for not only himself but for all his kids, manages to disarm the man and shoot him with his own phaser.  
The man lays there with glassy eyes and a slack mouth and JT feels only the barest traces of guilt.  
It’s the first time he frisks a dead body for anything useful.  
It won’t be the last.

 

JT is down to nine kids.  
Then Layla, who had come with him to keep watch while he stole more rations, gets shot.  
Jim kills the two guards, but knows they have already contacted more, knows that he has a minute if not less.  
Layla is dying, but she is not dying quickly enough to escape Kodos’ men.  
JT cannot leave her to those animals, knows they will torture the dying girl for information. Layla, only two years younger than the fourteen year old JT, knows all of this as well.  
She begs him to help her die.  
JT very carefully pulls her head into his lap, her once pretty blonde hair almost black with dirt and sweat and now tears.  
He doesn’t use a phaser.  
His knife is sticky with blood when he pulls it free of her breast but knows that the job was clean.  
Layla wouldn’t have felt a thing.  
JT leaves her body, grabs the supplies he’d managed to find and runs.

 

A week later, months and months since their ordeal began, Starfleet finally comes to save them.  
JT had started with thirteen kids.  
Jim leaves with only eight.

 

He’s in hospital for a month, sickly thin and malnourished. He’s quiet and angry, a lethal combination according to the therapist he’s paired with. The man doesn’t seem to really care. Luckily Jim doesn’t really care either.  
It takes two weeks for Winona to turn up. She actually looks at him for the first time in _years_. He’s so sick that he looks nothing like George Kirk at that moment. She still won’t meet his eyes though.  
His eyes that are always icy blue now, distrustful and dark.  
Jim finds it within himself to blame his father once more, still hates George Kirk.

 

Jim pretends to go back to Iowa quietly.  
He stays one week with Frank, his mother back to the Black, before he leaves.  
Winona doesn’t find out for another three months.

 

Jim almost dies again at sixteen.  
It’s winter where he’s ended up, somewhere on earth but nowhere close to home.  
It’s cold and icy and Jim hides in a disused barn.  
The problem with new places for Jim was always the food. He knew he was allergic to certain things, having been born right next to an exploding warp core, his immune system new and fragile.  
New places meant new food and new allergies.  
Jim has an allergic reaction alone in the barn and as he lies there gasping for air he assumes he’s about to die.  
Jim feels so _disappointed_ that he’s done nothing with his life.  
Hates that he never stood tall enough to escape George Kirk’s shadow.  
Hates that he’d always had to try to do so.  
Jim wakes the next morning weak but alive. He moves on.

 

Jim is only eighteen when he enters a bar filled with Cadets. He fakes his way through a few drinks with a dodgy ID and hits on a pretty Cadet for the hell of it.  
He’s actually pretty interested when she says she’s studying languages, even when she uses big fancy words to make him look like an idiot. Jim has been many things in his life—Stupid has _never_ been on that list.  
He attempts to ask her name.  
He meets Cupcake for the first time.  
Jim likes fighting sometimes. Likes the way it makes the blood rush through his body like he’s thirteen and driving him Father’s Corvette off a cliff again.  
He gets his rear handed to him, although a little of that is because he can’t really be bothered fighting back – He’s eighteen and back in Iowa with nothing to show for his life so far except for a charming smile and a clever mouth.  
Christopher Pike brings up his Father. Jim has been in Iowa for less than a day and someone has already shoved George Kirk back into his face.  
Jim quietly seethes and hates, hates, _hates_ George Kirk.  
Pike dares him to join Starfleet.  
Jim leaves the bar with no intention of going back.

 

Jim can’t help but be drawn back to the _Enterprise_. She’s sitting in a construction yard in Iowa, beautiful even half completed. She’s the only reason Jim had come back here.  
She’s going to leave Iowa and travel the Black.  
Jim decides he wants to follow her.  
Pike seems unsurprised to see Jim which is odd, because Jim had only decided the hour before that he was going to join Starfleet.  
“Four years? I’m gonna do it in three.”  
The _Enterprise_ is scheduled for completion three years from now.

 

Jim meets Leonard McCoy.  
Leonard tells him that he was divorced, his wife took the whole planet and—  
“All I’ve got left is my bones.”  
Jim wondered how long it will take for the doctor to start introducing himself as Bones.

 

It takes just shy of three months before Jim hears Leonard introduce himself as Bones.  
It’s another month before he starts calling himself Bones on purpose.  
Jim’s never really had a proper friend before.

 

Jim has sex a lot.  
It feels good and he can make his partner feel good, so why not?  
It’s always one night and Jim always makes it entirely clear that he is not looking for anything else.  
Then Jim meets Gaila.  
She’s just like him, wanting sex for the fun of it, for the pleasure and nothing else.  
They agree to be friends with benefits and Jim thinks that if he were capable of love he might actually fall for her.

 

Jim is so close to graduating (in three years, take that Pike) when the _Kobayashi Maru_ incident happens.  
He does the test once, watching and careful and loses horribly and everyone dies.  
The second time he pays attention, changing things to be perfectly by the book and everybody still dies.  
Jim figures it out – The test is designed to be unbeatable.  
It makes Jim’s blood boil.  
Jim, who had been Jim then JT then Jim again, who knew that bad things happened and it was something everyone had to learn, was furious.  
The test was simply teaching cadets to _give up_ if they knew they were not going to win.  
Jim would never, _ever_ give up.  
He hadn’t when he was thirteen and driving a Corvette off a cliff, hadn’t when he was JT and he saved kids instead of taking the safe route, hadn’t when he was struggling to scavenge food to survive.  
Jim cheats, hacking the program and putting in his own back door.  
He expects the Academy Council to expel him on the spot.  
It gets a touch more complicated than he expected.

 

Commander Spock brings up George Kirk, completely missing the reason Jim had cheated to start with.  
Jim clenches his fists so tight his fingernails draw blood from him palms.  
Then, everything goes to shit.

 

Jim ends up on the _Enterprise_ on her maiden voyage.  
It’s not really the way he’d been hoping though.

 

Jim knows Gaila was on the _USS Farragut_ which is now floating in pieces around them.  
He is surprised to find that he already misses her.

 

Things go about as well as Jim had been expecting with the way his life always went.  
He winds up on Delta Vega, waking up to a throbbing headache and a trashed escape pod.  
He’s meters down an ice hole with a damaged pod, very few supplies and knows that every Starfleet vessel that could currently assist him is either in the Laurentian System or the very ship that left him here.  
Jim decides to try for the Starfleet base instead of waiting around to freeze to death.  
He gets attacked by a monstrous creature and falls down a very large hill in his efforts to escape, which draws hot lines of fire up his back as ice shards dig into his delicate flesh.  
He finds an ice cave but it isn’t as safe as he’d been hoping.  
The tongue of the creature burns when it wraps around his ankle, and for the umpteenth time in his life, James Tiberius Kirk is pissed off that he will die in an utterly pointless way with nothing to show for his life except an angry Vulcan named Spock.  
Then he’s saved by a Vulcan named Spock who is less angry and more sad, who tells him that other him’s Father had lived to see other Jim become Captain of the _Enterprise_.  
Jim finally feels something other than hatred for his Father.  
The apathy he feels now is almost worse.

 

Jim pushes Spock until he snaps and winds up as Captain.  
It’s not the way he wanted to get here. Everything is _wrong_.  
At the very back of his mind, thirteen year old Jim who is driving towards the edge of the ravine in a shiny red Corvette whispers to him, _I told you so_.

 

They save Earth, rescue Pike and the Romulans get pulled apart by the gravity of a black hole in a perfect show of poetic justice.  
It’s just a shame that the ship, the beautiful _Enterprise_ , is crippled and it will now take them five days to get home on impulse only.  
He sends the Alpha bridge crew away, telling them to rest.  
He makes sure entire crew get the chance to call their families.  
Jim doesn’t leave the chair through Beta and Gamma shift except to take numerous calls from Starfleet Command, some congratulating him, others calling for his head. Then the Alpha crew is back once more.  
Jim doesn’t say more than is required. He keeps his feet to the floor, feeling the vibrations of the ship and making sure that even the slightest change in rhythm is accounted for. The _Enterprise_ is struggling but she will make it as long as they are careful, and Jim needs her to make it home, especially when so many others won’t.  
The Alpha crew are strangely respectful and it makes him antsy.  
Also, he really, _really_ hurts.  
His back aches from his fall in the ice, his ribs throb from the numerous times he’s attempted to crush his chest in the last two days, his throat burns when he breathes from the three separate times he’s been choked and his headache is reaching a crescendo.  
Bones finally catches up with him halfway through the shift.  
“James Tiberius Kirk.” He hears as the turbo lift opens, the deep timbre vibrating through Jim and temporarily covering the throb of the _Enterprise’s_ thrust. Bones sounds pissed, but Jim isn’t all that concerned.  
There’s nothing Bones can do to him that someone hasn’t already done.  
“The Beta shift crew tell me you didn’t leave while they were here.” The entire bridge is listening now but Jim continues to monitor their progress towards Earth. “Oddly enough, the Gamma shift tells me the same thing.”  
Jim sees Spock turn to face him fully, giving up the pretence. He has his eyebrow raised in a way that Jim is becoming increasingly familiar with. “Captain?”  
Jim ignores him. Bones continues in his place. “When exactly where you going to see me Jim? I know you’re injured. When were you going to _rest_?”  
And Jim cannot help the brief sneer that pulls up the corner of him mouth.  
He has spent the last 24 hours being questioned at every turn.  
He’s had enough.  
“And where, exactly,” Jim fires off, voice hard and icy like his eyes. “Do you suggest I rest, Doctor McCoy?”  
It takes only a second for Bones to get it, eyes going wide at the tone of his voice and takes a half step away from Jim. Bones knows better than anyone that Jim is _dangerous_.  
Jim’s words follow him. “I don’t have a bed. I’m a stowaway, _remember_?”  
Jim refuses to leave the Bridge until the end of Alpha shift.  
He returns to the chair for Alpha shift the next day despite having spent the night in medical.  
The bridge crew treat him like he finally deserves the Chair.  
Jim can barely look at them.

 

Pike gives him the _Enterprise_.  
She’s gorgeous and perfect and Jim _does not deserve her_.

 

He spends the next few years in a strange kind of limbo.  
Everything is going so _well_ and Jim just doesn’t understand how nothing has gone wrong yet.  
His life always goes wrong.  
This time however, it’s actually his fault. He pushes and _pushes_ because Jim had always needed to know where the line was, always has to know where to stop. That was just the way it had been his whole life, and he just doesn’t know any different.  
The unfortunate thing about the line was that you never could see it until you’d stepped right over it.  
Pike takes the _Enterprise_ away from him and it hurts but finally _something_ makes sense again.  
He’ll get her back eventually, and hopefully he’ll have actually earnt her.

 

Jim realigns the warp core after the shit storm that was the last few days and finally, _finally_ feels he’s exactly where he deserves to be.  
He’s saved the ship, stopping her from falling to earth and oblivion.  
He’s managed to save what’s left of his crew, his family, and he’s almost happy he won’t have to deal with the _agony_ of losing so many of them for much longer.  
He’s dying, far slower than he ever thought he’d go.  
He makes it back to the outer containment area. His whole body aches and he almost thinks he can feel his DNA unravelling.  
Spock is suddenly there. Jim makes sure he’s saved the ship, makes sure that he’s actually dying for a reason.  
Jim had only ever wanted to live long enough to die for a reason.  
And then he does.

 

Jim dreams.  
He’s sitting in a shiny red Corvette, the sun shining warmly and the wind rushing past his ears. There’s something different though – He’s sitting in the passenger seat.  
He’s sitting next to thirteen year old Jim who looks young and exhilarated and _purposeful_.  
They drive past someone. Someone with blond hair and bright blue eyes that looks so much like Jim’s that Winona can’t stand the sight of her youngest son.  
Jim turns back to himself.  
“Was it worth it?” Young Jim asks, sounding honestly curious.  
Jim thinks for a half moment, remembering the good moments that shone like brilliant supernovas amidst the Black.  
“Yes. It was definitely worth it.”  
There’s another flash of blond on the side of the road and young Jim _turns_.  
They’re driving over dirt now, sliding and barely controlled.  
Jim hears young Jim reply, clearly even over the steadily increasing howl of the wind.  
“I’m glad. I don’t want to regret this.”  
Young Jim turns the car and leaps clear, leaving Jim behind.  
The car careens over the edge in slow motion. Jim looks up to see himself as he is now standing next to his father. They are the same height, same weight. Both blonde with the same clever smile.  
Jim finally notices a difference.  
George Kirk’s eyes are bright, clear, sky blue—happy and so _alive_.  
Jim’s eyes are even bluer but at the same time dark and so, _so icy_. James Tiberius Kirk’s eyes are the only real clue that he is _brilliant_ and _vicious_ and _dangerous_.  
Jim finally sees the difference that no one else had bothered to look for.  
Gravity catches up with Jim and he’s finally _falling_ , the way he has been since he was thirteen and he’d stolen George Kirk’s car. The way he has been since he was seconds old and the entire universe had warped around him.  
He’s falling but he’s about to _finally_ hit bottom.  
The only way forward is up.


End file.
